“Fake”/non-official Hikey 960 boards?

Products Support HiKey
#1

Hi guys,

I hope you can help.

I’m struggling to figure out if the board sold on Amazon is some cheap copy sold at the same price as the others. I can’t find much information on who is manufacturing these boards other than the ones that are linked from the 96boards website. In the case below I don’t see any box, only some outlet image that would make it seem sketchy. The distributor is listed as smartfire.cn, and the seller (SmarFly info) has a fake name and address.

Are there multiple distributors? How do I know which are legitimate, if that is even a thing?

Here’s the product info:

HiKey 960 Single Board Computer Octa core - 96Boards Reference Development Platform (4GB LPDDR4 & 32GB eMMC ) Running with AOSP & Linux

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073P8BW96/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_8x-YAbVNS19HH

Thanks for any feedback!

#2

First and foreforemost I have not seen any reports of clones of
Hikey960.

However Hikey960 is made be Lemaker so you’ll have to contact them to
verify if any specific supplier is authorized or not. They have clear
contact details on their website:

http://www.lemaker.org/product-hikeysecond-index.html

Finally please note that the Lemaker store front includes a list
of authorized suppliers (but I didn’t see a date of last update):

http://www.lenovator.com/product/80.html

Daniel.

#3

Thank you Daniel.

I received a reply from the Amazon seller: “We are the Hikey960 manufacturer in China. The board has its official package. We offer an normal package outside since there are many accessories that we provide additionally on Amazon.”. I’ll forward this to Lemaker and see what they say.

It would be interesting to see what shows up later this week; I’ll report back for others reference.

1 Like
#4

To follow-up. Board (4GB version) arrived today in a LeMaker-branded box - no offset screws tho as the official Amazon sales listing - with a 4GB silver sticker on the front (two instruction manuals of the same type (?) in English). It looks official enough and seems to be working fine. Not sure how else to verify, other than the box it came in and the packaging of the board itself. So for anyone wanting to purchase from that specific Amazon vendor who claims to be a Chinese manufacturer of the boards, I have no concerns.

Thanks

#5

There are other distributors on Amazon, like https://www.amazon.com/LeMaker-HiKey-Single-Board-Computer/dp/B07B6SFJHK

They’re these guys out of NJ/USA: About LoveRPi – Love Our Pi - The Destination for Single Board Computers and they do speak english.